New Yorker magazine and the 'Irish short story'

In my note on the BBC at 100 Symposium - in an aside - I suggested a possible study of the influence of New Yorker magazine on the 'Irish short story' in the twentieth century...

http://fiddlersdog.blogspot.com/2022/09/the-bbc-at-100-symposium.html

See now an article by Nora Shaalan, in the online journal Public Books, a digital humanities approach.  This New Yorker interest in short stories from Ireland/of Ireland has already been noted by, for example,  Ben Yagoda...

Yagoda, B. (2001) About Town: The New Yorker and The World It Made. Da Capo Press.

Nora Shaalan puts some figures on that.

My suggestion is that New Yorker magazine also shaped, from a distance, stories that did NOT make it into the magazine...

P.O'S.

 

The View from the Fiction of the “New Yorker”

10.13.2022

Digital Humanities

By Nora Shaalan

https://www.publicbooks.org/geography-fiction-the-new-yorker/?utm_source=pocket-newtab-global-en-GB

... At the magazine’s inception, in 1925, the fiction section was a hybrid of different genres, including miscellaneous pieces that straddle the line between prose, verse, and visual art. The section only began to cohere circa 1945. Around the same time, the magazine began to regularly publish fiction by a small subset of authors. Between 1945 and 2019, the magazine published 7,451 stories by 1,493 different authors, but 4,398 of these stories (more than 66 percent of them) were written by just 149 authors (less than 10 percent of the total pool).4 Many of these 149 authors have become synonymous with the magazine, and their work has come to define a dynamic New Yorker fiction tone and style, characterized by ironic detachment and a meticulous, if somewhat overbearing, attention to facticity...

... Many of the countries that score relatively high in both metrics are the usual suspects—the United Kingdom, France, Italy—with one exception. There is an outlier that has a relatively high diversity score and that outperforms the United States in the granularity measure: Ireland. A former colony, whose landmass and population are significantly smaller than those of the United States, Ireland boasts a granularity score of 1.875. The country is mentioned using 77 unique locations, placing it in the top five most diverse countries in the corpus. There are many plausible reasons why evocations of Ireland are both diverse and granular, but one striking detail stands out. Of the 176 stories that mention Ireland, 135 are by Irish writers—the likes of Edna O’Brien, Roddy Doyle, and William Trevor.